an anti-social framing of ~~technical~~ disability

this talk explores what happens when we stop treating accessibility as a purely technical concern; how data visualizations and other technical communications could consider what is seen, what is hidden, and who is invited into the work, as modern art does.

this perspective offers a way to understand accessibility not as an afterthought or a checklist, but as a creative and relational practice.

through this lens, the talk invites folks to experiment with art and reproduction as a method for rethinking technical practice. making art, even imperfectly, cultivates questions that could be used to bring accessibility earlier into the process:

• what/who am i including and excluding?
• how do i make the implicit explicit?
• what senses are used to portray this narrative?

web version

about antisocial and accessibility in this talk

anti-social

a dissonance with the rules and environments we're social in

the poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted," they cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power, is manifest in the famous story, "the emperor's new clothes." "well-adjusted" courtiers, having vested interests, save the emperor as beautifully appointed. the "antisocial" brat, unaccustomed to the old environments, clearly saw that the emperor "ain't got nothing on." the new environment was clearly visible to them.

this talk was developed on an island, and it takes effort to leave its pastoral silence.

accessibility

the technical parts of disability, physical and digital

overview

i appreciate the opportunity to discuss art with you at the aptly named CREATE seminar series. today, we'll look through modern, post-modern, and contemporary art technologies as means to making difficult concepts accessible.

i'm going to show a lot in a short time; this talk is chock full of links and content you can revisit later.

it makes me happy to leave the island to be here, to share my passions for art and science:

1. i get to revisit so many beautiful things, appreciate where i've been, and find new meaning in works.
2. presentations challenge my accessibility practice.
3. i get to encourage folks to appreciate, make, and open themselves up to art.
4. i've saved enough spoons to be here.

outcomes

i hope when this talk is over you find yourself wanting to make or learn something.

getting trapped inside a work

i often think of alexander calder making his moving sculptures and his unique perspective embedded inside the work. sometimes, this feeling hits me the strongest when i am working with data zooming in and out of it.

overall i like thinking about and viewing art. to the right i'm at the LACMA maintaining a safe distance from alexander calder's little face, but flirting dangerously with acceptable art viewing of max ernst's entire city, while seemingly ignoring magritte's treachery of images. my first time through i missed the calder.

the treachery of images

magritte was treading in ambiguity and his work to disrupt the hierarchy and order of figures and texts. his primary media was painting, and eventually sculpture, and these media proved effective at clarifying ambiguity.

objects and texts

magritte established a set of working idioms for the ambiguity of words and images. for him, these were not problems, but possibilities.

can we flip this last sentiment to say: in a text, images have the same substance as words.

these thoughts remind of alan perlis's epigrams in programming idioms:

• one man's constant is another man's variable.
• if you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some.
• everything should be built top-down, except the first time.

the ambiguity of language is the constant battle

in the early 20th century ferdindand de saussure and charles pierce began semiotics theories that study signs. in these theories they discovered interfaces that complicate representation:

1. there is ambiguity between the signifier and signified.
2. the position of the viewer matters

this is a major problem for technical and scientific enterprises where language is its entirety, and modern art continually finds ways to resolve these ambiguities.

for accessibility, language can be a poor technology for communicating the lived experiences of disabled people and assistive technology users. this is where we look to other media to find clarity in the ambiguities.

this is not a pipe

... is foucault's analysis of magritte's work, specifically, he is trying to locate the text in the work. and, spoiler alert: you can't smoke a painting.

there are at least two chapters relevent to the intersections of art, data, and accessibility.

1. klee, kandinsky, and magritte
2. the unraveled calligram

klee, kandinsky, and magritte

foucault compares the efforts of magritte to that of klee and kandinsky. he considers klee's lines, his dots that went for a walk, that come to move like text, and kandisky's synesthetic writings and education on the color harmony amongst points, lines and planes. all of their impacts are textual, and digital accessibility is a textual problem.

margaret lieteritz abstract data visualizations

margarent lieteritz is where we locate data as pure form.

Many of her works were strongly influenced by chemical engineering, and especially the field’s graphs which depicted physical properties of substances. Leiteritz’s paintings typically reworked a mundane graph using large expanses of colour and a bold abstract theme, changing it into a dynamic painting. Other works are reminiscent of Bunsen burner flame or DNA gel.

Then she devoted herself to diagrams of how they encountered her in her work. She artistically converted the technical drawings into oil. She designed with colors, with backgrounds, with details.

she was interested in chemical engineering and fully involved with her data. she generated her data, typeset her data, and painted her data.

through this intimate experience with different modes of representations we can imagine that margaret felt her work more. she engaged more of her senses then we may now. these are practices we should be able to recover if coding systems help us make the productivity gains they promise.

technical modern art books

modern art is technical movement.

margaret's works are standalone works of art. however, it is important to look to history to find that she studied with klee, kandinsky, and albers as a student at the bauhaus school. she was being taught at the same time that defining modern art texts were being written. in her works we can see what decades of modern art practice brings to representation of information.

some of the important modern art texts of the time are:

• paul klee's pedagogical sketchbook

• wassily kandinsky's point line and plane

• josef alber's interactions of color

• jan tischold's the new typography

  recently, i encountered multiple posts on table accessibility that reference the new typography. these technologies are still relevent. (eg a responsive accessible table)

the unravelled calligram

another important chapter in this is not a pipe discusses calligrams.

in calligraphy, calligrams are often words forming shapes.

in foucault's analysis, calligrams are irreducible units of type and form, think labels and axes, or <label> and <input> elements. they perform three functions:

1. augment the alphabet.
2. repeat something without the aid of rhetoric.
3. trap things into a double cipher.

Thus the calligram aspires playfully to efface the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to read.

data typography

data visualization is a typography exercise for folks like [ellen lupton] or [edward tufte] that operate with the same principles as calligrams. we interrogate meaning between the type and form, these double ciphers open up the work and encourage us to spend time with the forms to understand their position.

visualization principles are lossy

when we represent data in pure form we have a tendency to lose essential aspects of the work. the act of visualization creates inaccessibilities. ultimately, the object that data represents is not perceivable, and our work is to make it perceivable. we get to choose the extent to which the object is represented.

evenutally, we'll look to the (data) frame to recover the context lost in a visualization.

surrealism

modern art in america

rising facism changed the site of art influence. many, europeans travelled to the united states. black mountain college was a major site of american cultural production.

it is this experimentation and repetition that i am asking to be practicing after today's talk.

at every turn, modern artists experimenting with emerging technologies. and, i'll be asking y'all to recover these repetitive practices to rethink an accessible world.

woven histories

in 1965, Anni Albers wrote Threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning. we find that to be of the utmost truth in the inka empire's quipu knots.

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction is a modern art exhibit with several black mountain college residents (eg anni albers, ruth asawa). this exhibit shows how textiles touch us all and connect us to history.

it is here that we find another confluence and computing. we observe marilou schultz's (Navajo/Diné), replica of a chip reminding us that textiles and algorithmic practices connect with ada lovelace and the origins of computing history.

does this relate to calligraphy? let me weave you a story.

the museum of modern art

the museum of modern art is a museum and brand that frames enormous wealth. it is an intersectional space for the concerns of art, data, and access; some of them are relevent to our technical accessibility and data interests.

when i visited in the summer of 2025 i finally saw rebecca allen's girl lifts skirt, and could feel a deep current of art and computing history run through.,

apropos of nothing, it just above kazuo kawasaki's carna folding wheelchair. however, is there nothing to reference or did the curator decide there was!

computing history is embedded in the MOMA collection. it moma holds works from at least five artists from ACM SIGGRAPH's retrospective on digital female art pioneers.

"Older people, handicapped and normal people are separated in today's Japan, so designers need to make designs that are kind and caring and need to treat more handicapped people equally in society. . . . To be a visionary designer I want to design products for myself first."

dear data

other relevent data works include giorgia lupi and stefanie posavec's hand drawn, bespoke dear data post card communications.

these techniques are correspondences between george maxwell letter with edward tait as maxwell's equations were developed.

never alone

never alone refers to two things:

1. a MOMA exhibition on video games and interactive design
2. a video game created in collaboration with iñupiat alaska natives to share their storied histories

now video games are a relevent art and we can pull from their history to make accessible things. i find that that video game accessibility guidelines inform my decisions when web content accessibility guidelines are unclear.

post-modernism and the death of the author in a connected world

technology was disruptive to the 1960s. it where we find the death of the author, ted nelson's hypertext/hypermedia, doug englebart's the mother of all demos, and post-modernism.

anti-authoritarian by nature, postmodernism refused to recognise the authority of any single style or definition of what art should be. It collapsed the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture, between art and everyday life. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/postmodernism

who makes the meaning? barthes contends that "to give a text an author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text." this asks the author to consider the position of the reader relative to the work, and allows us to think how we can orient a text nearer to our viewers.

deconstructed frames

post-modernism ruptured conventional frames of meaning of the author and artist. two places where we see advances in frame theory are:

1. marvin minsky's "frame work for knowledge" promoted frames as a technique for artificial intelligence.

   A frame is a data-structure for representing a stereotyped situation, like being in a certain kind of living room, or going to a child's birthday party.

   Winograd (1974) discusses the recent trend, in theories of Artificial Intelligence, toward frame-like ideas.

2. jacques derrida deconstruction of kant's aesthetics shows that the frame is part of the work, it represents the parergon, the work around the work

   parergon also means the exceptional, the strange, the extra-ordinary

   

   the frame... disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy. the frame is in no way a background... but neither is its thickness as margin a figure. or at least it is a figure that comes away of its own accord. jacques derrida, 1987

   for derrida, the frame represents part of the work, it represents the work around the work, the omissions, the context.

the disintegrating frame

we're talking about the works framed by museums, but what is outside the frame?

the shock of recognition! in an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained- ignored. too many people know too much about each other. our new environment compels commitment and participation. we have become irrevocably involved wit, and repsonsible for, each other.

the benefits of wearing a mask

the guerrilla girls are an anonymous, international collective has that been making the nonvisible visible for decades. moreover, they are a statistics project elevating the un and under represented artists.

the guerrilla girls gorilla masks disrupt the frame and regain power with the right mask.

some selected guerilla girls works

these two works are chosen to demonstrate how we can think about creating accessible representations of the information in modern and activist art. don't they deserve better than just alt text?

progress at the whitney

while in new york i was so happy to see christine sun kim's "all day, all night" and amy sherald's "american sublime" at the whitney art museum. every floor was amazing.

christine sun kim "all day, all night"

we are privileged to experience christine sun kim's art. her position as a profoundly deaf artist gives us a glimpse into accessibility first art and exhibition. despite a lack of hearing, her exhibition is full of sound, the musicality jumps along the walls and in between frames.

her framed visualizations use simple materials to communicate difficult information.

for example, several rooms included tactiles with braille:

ghosted @ UW

christine sun kim might be familiar to y'all from her [ghosted] installation outside the university of washington's at Henry Hall with an imagine of the christine sun kim's exhibition book in the foreground.

parergon the work around the work

parergon also means the exceptional, the strange, the extra-ordinary

walking the frame's philosophical razor's edge let's us consider aesthetics without judgement. on one side is pure outside with the percievable on the other. it is when we teeter along the frame we can find the work around the work, the parergon.

along the frame we can work towards meeting people (the artist) where they are within their materials in their time and space. it is here in a museum we can think of who is afforded access to these works, or not. multiple frames start to reveal themselves in a very familiar way to the multiple frames in minsky's theories.

on ~~reproduction~~ replication

In principle a work of art has always been reproducible.

walter benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

reproduction, or replication, allows us to stand on the frame, to practice the work, and during the process we find time for complete sensory engagement.

does this make reproducible science an art? if so, then what role does the artist have?

sturtevant

art history is full of artists reproducing prior works (eg manet), not unlike the practice of homework or remaking data visualizations to understand the medium.

sturtevant is a unique modern conceptual artist with a restrospective at the MOMA called double trouble.

sturtevant's works look familiar, but they are not copies. they just look that way... they are studies of the work.

sturtevant mastered each medium to create full ranges of works, and documented the process in many media as it took shape.

sturtevant's art was all about the work, the process, and the medium. all with an overarching question what if a woman authored the work? as all the works she reproduced were men.

so what frames a visualization?

the answer to this question depends on the site and the material.

in the digital sense, text frames a visualization. inaccessibilities arise because of a lack of text, whether formal or programmatic language.

in the practical sense, the document frames a visualization, then the tab, then the browser, then the operating system, then the assistive technology. all of these frames need to be understood to test and remediate accessibility.

we can consider all these modern art techniques when developing accessible digital technologies.

making accessible technology using modern art techniques.

i'm encouraging y'all to get into the work. spend time making something to activate your available senses. heightening these awarenesses helps create more perceivable content, more accessible experiences.

we've demonstrated how modern art techniques can offer insight and engagement with a work. we have access to all of art history, hell most of it is crammed in the browser, this places us at a unique time to make meaningful material and non-materials works.

practicing designing accessible content

hopefully, at this point, we've understood that some paintings are meant to be read and some are meant to be written. we can begin to look at visualizations with soft eyes throught the work, we can go beyond reading visualization to viewing to making.

• a truly assistive unit takes time, work, and practice.
• digital accessibility is an exercise in text. make sure that the implicit is explicit in accessible contexts.
• build from html basics. html is the most assistive standard for developers building accessible web content. using html semantics properly will get us closer the accessible solutions than going the javascript route.
• learn what you can and cannot do with css.
• learn your screen reader. you have at least one.
• learn aria techniques to modify how visual information sounds while considering aria rules
• let evil rot
• consider how to make the work percievable visually, audibly, and tactilely.
• consider how to make the work operable with keyboard, with touch, with screen reader, with game control.
• think about how an object would be made in different materials and methods.
• overall, the most costly aspect of designing for accessibility is leaving it to the end.
• set up open broadcaster software to start streaming or recording videos.

exercises

all of this is about practicing html. we'll make our pdf from the html. javascript just changes the html, it changes what the document sounds like.

• make a self portrait, or make a portrait of this, in python or javascript
• practice css by finding interesting type settings examples.
• make a site, make a notebook, make a zine, make a comic, make a video
• recreate palettes from iteractions of color

some of my practices

tangle and weave

tangle and weave is a reference to donald knuth's literate programming that encourages considering programs to be works of literature.

sometimes i stream on youtube as tangle and weave.

• practice ability - a talk on a applying data visualization accessibility guidelines

• calligraphy with assistive technologies

  

bauhaus optical illusions

• original
• video variant

how could i make my calligraphy more of a digital experience?

there are points where alt text doesn't suffice anymore. when there are layers we need more information. these complex scenarios take practice.

how can we make data experiences more tactile, like tactile maps?

what if we started thinking of visualization through glass? how does external light interact with the glass? what could shadows acheive in data representation?

exercises in css

aligning decimals with pure css

a vulgar word cloud

nonvisual data frames and heat maps

dr dilettante

multiple embeddings of diagram from a table

that one time i made plots of video points

marginalia